ABSTRACT
This chapter conducts a detailed analysis of theatrical performance by actors with intellectual disabilities in the 1963 film A Child Is Waiting, directed by John Cassavetes. The intention is to re-evaluate the supposed ‘failure’ of the actors as in fact a resistance to the forms and conventions of theatre. The uneasiness of the young actors in various frames of performance reveals an emergent rhetoric and poetics of intellectual disability: a paradigm of tensions that continue to influence the development of theatres of learning disability. The film-makers’ desire to expose the conditions of ‘the mentally retarded’ is revealed to be caught up in an aporia of irreconcilability between witnessing and testimony. This may be traced back to the liberation of bodies at the limits of humanity from the concentration camps, and is particularly evident in the work of Bettelheim, who sought a kind of redemption for the victims of the camps in his treatment of autistic children. This aporia also informed movements to emancipate people with intellectual disabilities from institutions, an emancipation that was immediately reterritorialized in post-institutional medicalization and other forms of segregation. The chapter advocates the need for reiterative resistance to institutional oppression in both political and aesthetic spheres.
